Some thoughts on IT and UK Social Housing from a unique perspective of over 20+ years working with over 50 RSL's and social landlord groups.
Also a healthy knowledge of music over the last 5 decades
Available for independent housing RSL IT reviews, implementation, procurement of HMS, Repairs, CRM, EDM, DLO, Financial, Scheduling systems, critical friend etc. In Scotland I work with the super folks at Arneil Johnston.
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Saturday, 7 February 2015

Making Plans For Nigel

I have spent a lot of time working with Planned and Cyclical maintenance as well as asset management. In fact it was the first area anyone got me involved with in social housing IT and I remember it well. An area filled with black magic and a feeling that systems cannot possibly do the complicated job of working out when to replace kitchens, paint blocks or service gas.

Well I can tell you honestly, its all do-able and as with all things, relies on accurate source data. There is no excuse at all these days for any budgets being knocked out for planned or cyclical programmes, not to be easily linked back to elemental data element instances. That's with either third party asset management software (you know, the Promasters, Codeman, Pimss, Keystones or Asprey's) or your HMS (Housing Management System) modules.

Three separate critical friend advisers to social housing have asked me about this disconnect in the last month. It's certainly a trend that most asset management decisions around Planned & also Cyclical maintenance, seem to be informed by Excel. As readers of this blog will be aware, I think Excel has its place, but perhaps not in building a £5m+ capital programme. I will tell you straight, if I were the custodian of that budget, I would like to be able to trace every Kitchen, Bathroom, Rewire etc back to a poor (or failed English Decent Homes, Scottish Housing Quality Standard or Welsh Decent Homes) instance.

With such large ticket expenditure shouldn't all capital work be easily linked back to real instances of data and practical completion links back to update the asset register. Maybe in another blogpost I may expand into Component Accounting. But right there is just one more reason to have a joined up process.

If your asset team could not relate their Life Cycle Costing figures, 5 or 30 year plan to elemental data (to the nearest few thousand pounds), I would be pretty concerned.

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This blog combines my work interests of housing organisations getting the most from their IT, my love of monopoly and my oversized music collection. Every blog post ends with a music track. A good excuse to exhume old ghosts from time to time 8-)
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